Stardogs (54 page)

The roof had a low balustrade. The library was one of the tallest buildings in the city, but, naturally, not as tall as the Patrician’s palace. That many-turreted monstrosity hung over the harbor, like some tax-gathering vulture. However, on the landward side of the roof it couldn’t even be seen. Instead, there was a view out across the desert, with the thin green line of the Tinarana River and the cultivated lands beside it stretching away to the distant, dusty hinterland. Since Keilin had cut away some of the rotting brick of the chimney below the level of the balustrade, and replaced it with a stolen sheet of tin, he came up here often. Sometimes he came to trap pigeons . . . and sometimes just to gaze out across the vast emptiness, and pretend that he was lord of all he surveyed.

After the sea wind had howled for days, and blown away the miasma of coal and dung smoke from the city hearthfires, he could make out the distant purple mountains. He thought again about the colored illustration that painted his mental picture of mountains. Tall trees around a rushing stream that wove through mossy rocks. Huh! Half of the boys in the city didn’t even know there
was
anything beyond the desert. He’d seen the mountains on a map long before he’d come up here . . . That was it! Maps. They’d be watching the harbor. They’d watch the coast road, and the caravan trail. Perhaps there could be another way?

To Keilin the sea was no place of romance. It was symbolized by the garbage tide he and other scavengers picked at along the littered shore opposite the quays. He had fantasies about those mountains however . . . all those trees, and running water . . . surely that was the place where his dreams could come true? He looked out into the heat haze. He couldn’t see the mountains today, but that was where he was going. This afternoon, as soon as the library closed, he’d start looking for a map to get him there. He slipped back down the chimney and into sleep, secure in his optimism.

He got busy as soon as the doors below clicked shut. Gradually the optimism was eaten away as he realized that the atlases were at least three hundred years out of date. The surveyors hadn’t been aware that the planet had millennia-long alternating pluvial and dry cycles. The wet cycle had ended nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. The maps also held little in the way of guidance for a boy who would have to travel on foot. He sat peering at an array of them in anger and frustration. Why, they were all rubbish! They showed two rivers crossing the desert, the Tinarana, and the Syrah. The Syrah River was supposed to come out a few miles south of the city. But he’d stared out toward the mountains often enough to know there was no green line into the yellow-brown there, just a dusty valley. And this map showing vegetation types indicated the desert as “dry savannah.” He’d had to look the word up. Bloody drivel! Everyone knew that ten miles inland there was only sand and more sand.

He’d have to chance it up the Tinarana. But the caravans only went up to the Thunder Gorge, some hundred and fifty miles away. Above this the river had cut so deeply into the rock of the high plateau that farming with its water was no longer possible. Funny, the maps all showed
that
gorge.

Should he leave tonight? Procrastination, fueled by fear of the unknown, held him. Tomorrow night would be better. He hated the thought of leaving his refuge. Surely the search would be less intense the longer he waited? And he still had food. He could afford to wait a while.

If he’d gone up to the roof and seen the files of torches as the soldiers moved slowly from house to house, he might have been less tempted to stay. The search was not stopping for nightfall. The curfew might be hurting the Patrician’s nightly cut from the dock whores, but it was being strictly enforced. The great chain was raised across the channel. The ranged mangonels were readied. Nothing would leave by sea, and the city gates were closed siege-tight.

Testosterone can cause immense problems. Keilin had snuggled down in the early morning cool, enjoying the security of his lair for the last time. Sleep had claimed him rapidly. Actual sex was outside Keilin’s experience, but from his observation of his mother’s latter profession he knew a great deal about it. He’d made some detailed studies of the library’s dusty elderly medical textbooks, studying the much thumbed sections of otherwise pristine texts with care. But arousal made the pendant stone start to grow colder, and even touching himself made the terrible chill bite at his skin. Fear had always been enough to stop him going any further. But of late his dreams had been getting more and more vivid. Normally the cold jewel on his chest woke him abruptly.

A fold of his ragged shirt betrayed him. It isolated the jewel from contact with his skin and allowed the dream to develop in glorious, if slightly confused, technicolor. It was the instinctive thrusting movements at the moment of release that shook the jewel loose from its cocoon of cloth. It touched his skin, and the cold became suddenly intense. It felt as if it was burning into him. He screamed.

Wakefulness was instantly with him. He clapped his hand to his mouth. Had anyone below heard him? Peering fearfully through the tiny hole he had drilled with a rusty nail, he realized that it didn’t matter if they had heard his scream. Half the city must know exactly where he was now.

The central keep of the Patrician’s palace was a hollow tower, a hundred feet tall. Girdling it was a crenellated balcony, constantly guarded. The only way onto its roof was in a roped basket pulled up the center of the tower. Heavy caskets went up, and precious little ever came down. Perched like a single stalk of wheat stubble on the keep’s roof was the treasury. Or used to be. Now the dream of every thief in Port Tinarana was bursting through the roof of the library. No one would come up the stairway for a while, because a torrent of coins was running down it.

Coins pushed aside the plank and came spilling into Keilin’s hideout. Instinctively he grabbed gold wheels from among the brass and copper, and thrust them into his pockets. He was rich! He was rich! He would . . . His mind checked . . . halted. He would be lucky just to be
alive
in ten minutes’ time. A whole sea of money wouldn’t help him. If he stayed hiding here they’d find him sooner or later. Perhaps he could still run.

The coins left him no room to get out from under the bookcase, so he lifted it, tipping it over. He ran across the shifting coin floor to the window. Perhaps if he went up to the roof and down the drainpipe . . . His first glance told him that this was a futile hope. It was bright daylight, and people were rushing toward the building. His second, more intent look, made him nearly freeze with horror. Most of the crowd were surging toward the doors of the library. Behind him he could hear the screaming and fighting on the stairs. But what had frightened him was the tableau at the far window.

It was Kemp. A dead lamp-oil seller sprawled on his cart, a sluggish stream of blood still oozing from his back. The Guard-Captain was pouring yet another amphora of glistening yellow lamp oil in through the broken window. Keilin stepped back. He could perhaps mingle with the money-crazed hoard on the stair and escape. At the moment he doubted if they’d notice him if he were green, ten feet tall, with horns on his head. He had to get out before Kemp set fire to the place.

Then his eye was caught by something among the coins and scattered jewels. It was enough to halt him, midflight. For a moment Keilin thought it was his own, and clutched at the jewel around his neck. His pendant was still there . . . was this jewel the same? No, not quite. It
was
the same oily black, with the myriad of shifting colors seemingly within it, but it was smaller, and set on a broad golden ring instead. He hastily stooped and picked it up. And suddenly he heard the high-pitched whine again. It came from the roof. A section of masonry fell in a shower of purple sparks, and a platelike craft dropped through after it. Keilin did not wait to see the hooded passengers. He dived for the shelter of the chimney, a moment before the searing purple blast.

He was falling face-first down the chimney, the newly found jewel still crushed tight in his fist, as cold as his neck amulet had ever been. He didn’t see the suddenly materialized marble tombstone that felled the hooded assassins. From their oddly crumpled bodies seeped a puddle of greenish ichor, disappearing into the coins. But he did hear the terrified scream of “FIRE!”

Keilin’s scraping, bruising fall was stopped by the first bend in the flue. Disoriented, shaking and frightened, he simply lay still for a few moments. Even surrounded by bricks he could hear the hungry crackling roar of the flames as they ate at the dry paper of thousands upon thousands of books. And above the fire sound there was the thin screaming of humans.

If he went down… could he hide under the floor? He could wait until it burnt out, until nightfall. They’d surely think he was dead, and then he could escape. Keilin managed to turn himself the right way up, and began to descend. He reached the small open area underneath the lowest fireplace and curled there miserably, beginning to feel the pain of his rough passage. The fire roared above, and it was growing hotter, harder to breathe. The only relief was the stream of cold, fetid air that poured in on one side of him.

Panic started to rise in him, as the sweat began to prickle at his grazes and cuts. He couldn’t stay here. He might as well go up. If it wasn’t for the cold air streaming in, he’d have cooked already. Cold air . . . Logic struggled with the fear. It must be coming from somewhere, drawn in to feed the inferno above. If he could follow it, it might lead him out. The rubble lay in the way. If the truth be told, he’d never tried too hard to move it. He had always felt, well, crushed, down here in the blackness. But now he had the need, a dire and desperate need. He put the newfound ring into the thieves’ pouch on his ankle, and began pulling at broken blocks and scraps of concrete, shoving them aside with frantic strength, pushing them into the small hollow he’d occupied.

Now that he’d got going he found it wasn’t so bad. He could wriggle along quite effectively. In fact the space was growing bigger. Why, he’d almost be able to crawl soon. He followed the airflow. It was cool, damp, and it stank. The city’s ancient sewage system was largely unused now. Most of it had long since blocked up, and been abandoned. Instead, folk emptied their stinking buckets into the storm drains. The occasional terrible sea storm would flush these, but it was often a long while between storms. Sometimes the drains became clogged, and well-bribed heroes had to go down and shovel them clear.

Keilin shuddered. When he’d been just eight years old, his mother had “volunteered” him. They’d wanted a small one to get through the remaining space. The price had kept her cloudy-headed for a week. The memory of it gave him nightmares still. Rats he could deal with, but the sea of roaches down in that enclosed place had terrified him. Determinedly he stifled the recall flood and concentrated on the task ahead.

He came to the point where the air rushed in from the big concrete pipe. A thin pipe from the roof above had once joined it here, but corrosion had long ago eaten away the pipe juncture. It was almost certain that the long-dead builders shouldn’t have used that handy storm-drainage pipe for disposing of the library’s waste water, but, well, there it had been, temptingly close to the foundations. Surely a hand basin’s worth of water wasn’t going to make that much difference?

The boy felt at the small hole. Stuck. At this point! In frustration he pounded at the edge of it. The concrete crumbled slightly, and small stones fell to splash into the unpleasant liquids that trickled below. The concrete was centuries old, and the pipe juncture had been cut through the steel reinforcing once hidden inside the concrete. Now, exposed to oxygen and often wet, rust had slowly eaten at the steel and the expanding rust had cracked the concrete along the reinforcing lines.

Pounding with a broken slab of tiling, he broke a larger opening. It was still not very wide, but from years of burglary, Keilin knew that where his head and one arm could go, his body could follow. He squirmed through, down into the fetid trickle.

On hands and knees he crawled to where the pipe joined a larger canal. He dared not stop down here in the noisome darkness. The roaches presumed that meat that didn’t move was dinner. Ahead he saw light. Distant daylight shone down in a barred pattern through a street grating. Above was the shaft that could take him out of here. He climbed the rusty staples towards it. And stopped. He could hear voices.

He couldn’t go up. Not while there was someone out there. But here in the light, the roaches were wary. He hung waiting, waiting for the speakers to move. One voice was high-pitched and lisping. He remembered being herded along to listen to it, just before he ran away from his mother. Only then the man had sounded arrogant, and almost infinitely powerful. Now the voice was wooden, and afraid. “. . . The magicianth dead, I tell you. Nothing could live through that fire!”

The reply was also high-pitched but too full of clicking sibilants to make sense to him, but it was enough to make Keilin begin to retreat.

The Patrician spoke again. His girlish lisping voice, usually so haughty, actually trembled. “I have ordered treble guardth on the wallth and fourfold on the gateth. Thereth patrolth on the coatht roadth. The caravanth have been thtopped. No thips will thail. You can’t put your,” he hesitated, “men on the gateth. The people would get to hear of it and . . . they’d revolt. I couldn’t thtop them. They fear you more than death itthelf!”

Keilin didn’t wait for the reply. With infinite care he began to lower himself back down into the dark. He knew now why the Patrician had offered a reward for his capture. Fifteen years ago Port Tinarana had been flooded with a tide of terrified refugees from across the shallow sea. They were fleeing the Morkth and their zombielike troops. These refugee-settlers still made up the bulk of the Port’s underclass. Mothers used tales of these Morkth to frighten their children into good behavior. Yet one of these awful creatures plainly had the city’s overlord as its inferior partner. It was plain that the Morkth hunted him too.